Flaherty joins long line of Canadian politicians who try to keep health mum

OTTAWA — When Finance Minister Jim Flaherty revealed that he’s been suffering from a serious dermatological condition for nearly a year, he joined a long line of Canadian politicians who have kept their own health concerns quiet until forced into the open.
Meanwhile, Americans are privy to President Barack Obama’s blood pressure in his published physical results, and a press release is sent out if outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faints.
While the debate over the public’s right to know and a public figure’s right to privacy is nothing new, there’s a substantial difference in the default privacy positions in Canada and the United States, said Christopher Waddell, the director of journalism and communication at Carleton University.
“Frankly, we’d be a lot better off if we were closer to the American point of view,” Waddell said.
“The nature of information technology and information communications these days gets those stories out there and moves them around so quickly that I think you’re really best to address it with facts as soon as you can.”
On Thursday, Flaherty disclosed that he is undergoing treatment for an autoimmune skin disease, bullous pemphigoid, characterized by large blisters, redness and itching. His non life-threatening condition is being treated with a steroid, prednisone, that has a host of side effects including bloating, weight gain, anxiety and sleeplessness.
Flaherty is far from the first Canadian politician who has kept his health out of the public realm.
Two years before becoming prime minister, Jean Chretien, then the leader of the official Opposition, had a benign nodule removed from his right lung without even his press spokesman knowing about it. When Lucien Bouchard – the leader of the Bloc Quebecois – had his leg amputated in 1994 after he contracted a case of flesh-eating disease, it was days before the public was let in on how close the leader had come to dying.
In 2006, just after the federal election, the soon-to-be Prime Minister Stephen Harper was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night for chest pains. He was treated for asthma and released. His officials tried to keep it mum, but a reporter saw him in the emergency room.
In 2011, a shockingly gaunt, pale and raspy-voiced Jack Layton revealed that he had a new cancer just a month before he succumbed to the disease. The former NDP leader’s family and political party have never said what kind of cancer killed him. More than a year prior to that, he had held a press conference to say he had prostate cancer.
And just last year, the Conservative government only confirmed that Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan had been hospitalized for heart problems after rumors started swirling that he was ill.
After wishing Flaherty well in his recovery, Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae said Thursday that he didn’t think Canadian politicians were more reticent than their American counterparts to reveal their health information.
“I think we do tend to respect people’s privacy in this country, but obviously if we’re going in for an operation or something is taking place, people know about it,” Rae told reporters.
“But I think sometimes people are entitled to a bit of privacy.”
Disclosure of health issues is warranted if it might impede a minister’s ability or if there are rumours that need to be squelched, and the latter seems to apply to Flaherty, said Jonathan Rose, a politics and mass media expert at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.
But, otherwise, Canada should not seek to emulate the U.S.’s “spectacle culture” in politics, Rose said.
“The American model is not a good model. It is driven by politicians being objects of prurient curiosity, whether it’s Bill Clinton’s peccadillo or John Kennedy’s trysts in the White House,” Rose said.
Flaherty was not in the House of Commons Thursday for Question Period.